Preparing Your Contact Database for SMS

The field Phone is not referenced by the SMS feature, so do not use this for mobile numbers that you want to use for sending text messages.

The 'Mobile SMS Opt-in' field

When the Emarsys SMS feature is activated, Emarsys automatically creates a Mobile SMS Opt-in field in your account. This field determines whether or not a contact can be sent content via SMS.

When the SMS feature is first activated, this field is of course empty, so Emarsys will initially treat all contacts as having an SMS opt-in.This means that all contacts with a valid mobile phone number will be eligible to receive SMS campaigns. It is up to you to segment the contacts accordingly using other database fields.

After a contact opts out, the value for this field will be set to FALSE and they will no longer be able to receive SMS campaigns.

The 'Mobile' field

The Mobile field stores the mobile number of the contacts.This is a system field and exists in your Emarsys account by default.

Note: When importing contacts, Emarsys will normally try to map telephone numbers to the field Phone. You must therefore pay attention to the field mapping and make sure you have selected Mobile instead.

Emarsys treats all mobile numbers as international, therefore you must:

include the international country code.

remove the leading 0 from the local number.

You can prefix the numbers with 00 and + or leave these out. All versions will be accepted.

Example: A mobile phone number in Austria might be 0664 123 456. The international code for Austria is 43. Any of these three numbers will be valid:

436641234567

+436641234567

00436641234567

When importing contact data, make sure to map these two fields correctly in the same way as you would for any other data imports.